Yesterday I came across a Youtube video by a polyglot talking about having watched Into the Spider-verse fifty times in his target language (Spanish).

I’ve tried watching films in my target language before. If I was too familiar with the film, I was mentally translating half of it, which isn’t helpful to language acquisition. If however I wasn’t familiar enough, I couldn’t follow the speech at all, even slowed down.

What I had never considered was watching the same film fifty times! That way, even if I could only pick out the odd word in the first watch in my target language, by the time I’d watched it fifty times, I’d know it almost word-for-word. At least, that was the video maker’s experience.

Who wants to watch the same film fifty times? Well, I’m that kind of person! I’m a huge fiction nerd. I used to know every encyclopaedic detail of the Harry Potter universe. I can–and do–recite my favourite scene, including gestures, of Doctor Who by heart. My default housework playlist is about fifty percent songs from various cartoons which I’m word-perfect in. (Ninety-nine percent of the rest is songs in my TLs.)

I’m generally more into books and television shows than films, but I do love Pixar and Disney and Dreamworks animations. And the beauty of those films is that, like Into the Spider-verse, there’s always something new to spot.

So, yesterday evening, I watched a full-length film in Latin American Spanish. I chose Onward because I’ve seen it two or three times already, enough to be familiar with the plot but not with all the dialogue, because it’s so incredibly detailed and wondrous, and because it’s a beautiful story that moves me and I don’t see myself getting tired with any time soon.

My experience? I couldn’t understand most of the speech—and it was so much faster than Dreaming Spanish!—but I followed the plot really easily, enjoyed every moment, cried at the end. Then I made a spreadsheet brainstorming ideas for what films I could use for which target languages on my list.

I have this need to match them appropriately where possible, e.g. Luca in Italian, Rio in Portuguese. And Ratatouille I will definitely find a way to watch in French (only the English version is available on Disney Plus UK, much to my annoyance). I found out some while back that the Madagascar films are available in Ukrainian, so have earmarked those for when I pick Ukrainian up again.

It occurred to me afterwards that, although I’ve made Spanish my current priority, this technique would definitely help with my French, which is still above my Spanish level. If my intent is to make the LingQ Mini Stories more comprehensible, it makes sense to apply this technique to the TL I’m still currently best at …